Make an EASY Amsteel soft shackle with overhand knot - includes break tests!

Would you like to see how to tie an easier soft shackle using an overhand knot instead of the button knot? Stay till the end because we're going to break test what we make in this episode of How Not to Highline. Hi I'm Ryan Jinks and welcome to my gear room. Go to hownottohighline.com if you want to learn how to bolt or how to highline and today we're going to cover in this episode how to tie an overhand knot on a soft shackle versus the button knot soft shackles that I've always promoted on this channel. Now they're both super good enough we're going to break test these at the end to see how they break and what strength they break at. Basically you don't want the noose that goes over the head to slip off and what makes these bomber is the fact that the head is so big it's not going to slip off. Now you're not supposed to put knots in Dyneema because it reduces the strength. So if I took this soft shackle and put a knot in it that's going to reduce the strength. If I try to tie two ends of Dyneema together it's very slippery material and that will literally slip out before it breaks. Knots are bad however in this video we're going to show you why that's not the case and how to make an easier soft shackle if you just don't like doing the button knot. Now we do promote the button knot for a couple reasons on this channel but also it's kind of the hazing process if you're a new highliner and trying to get into the gear you should suffer a little bit making your own stuff and uh really get to earn that highlining badge. However for anchors you can do these they're way simpler and then you don't have to wonder if your knot is right because when you're highlining you don't want to wonder if you're going to die. So let's get started. Michael Melner is going to show us how he makes his soft shackles that he's used for years. Hi I'm Michael Melner and the reason I like the big overhand soft shackle is because they're really really easy to inspect. When I got started and I was tying the button knots I couldn't tell if I had made a mistake or not so I started tying these. They say they could be about three percent stronger but I'm not sure enough testing has been done to really confirm that. Maybe we'll find out later today. So right here I have all of my supplies gathered. I have my splicers. Now these are d splicers you don't have to use these you can use a piece of wire, a piece of copper wire, a coat hanger, kind of whatever you have around the house. But something in this shape this big u shape I found helps a lot you'll see why in a few minutes. I've got a sharp paring knife and duct tape so we'll go ahead and get started with our six mil soft shackle. So first I'm going to measure out length for this purpose I'll just probably do an arm's length then I'll take my duct tape where I'm going to cut. Why do you use duct tape? It makes it easier to cut because if you can wrap the tape really tightly it keeps all the strands together. See with it wrapped that tightly it cuts through like butter. This stuff can be kind of difficult to cut. Once I have my two ends I like to go ahead and taper my ends. It's like the most tedious part of making the shackle so I like to get it over with first. Now since this is 12 strand I'm going to take two strands about each inch and try and pick them to where they're together. So I try and pick a spot where there's two coming out together like that cut about an inch off. It's harder when it's not taped. Go about two inches down same thing picking strands that I haven't already cut. We'll do that same thing to the other end. All right so now that they're both tapered we are going to make our eyelet. This is going to be the little noose guy that goes around the knot making sure my ends are even. I like to use the sharpie for to measure because you don't want to make your eyelet too big and then I will mark where I'm feeding through. Through our am steel making sure that there's six strands on either side. So let's count one two three four five so I think I need to go one more one two three four five six three four five six. The cool thing about these d splicers is that you can feed your am steel through it'll pinch down at the top pull through. So just to make sure the we measured our eyelet correctly I'm going to put both ends even pull it straight make sure I like that eyelet size that looks great. What we're basically going to do is we're going to take each one of these strands and feed it back through itself to create little loops on both ends. I'm actually going to go from the end of the taper just to give us a little bit of extra room. Okay so in order to make an eyelet that's about this size like so we're going to splice this through so this rope is going to be inside of this strand but you can't just go this same distance and feed through because as we splice it through it's going to scrunch up the rope that we're splicing through and take up more space. So we're going to want to come further up than the distance that we measured so I like to start way up here just to be sure. The cool thing about these d splicers is that you can just keep scrunching on these things and go further than the distance that you measured. So right where we where our mark is we're going to come out I like to push as much as I can down because I can pull these ends apart. It's really important not to pinch the full diameter of the rope because it'll make it really really difficult to pull it back through so I like to pinch maybe a couple of the ends that are tapered so that we have so that when it folds over itself to come back through it feeds back through easier. At first I made a lot of mistakes and I would this would pop off while it's inside the rope it's really easy to pull it back out and start over again. Once we're through we remove our pinch and check our eyelet. I like to leave a smaller eyelet while I'm doing this part and then I can adjust it once it's flat but so I'll so here we have a incredibly small eyelet I'm just going to adjust that just a little bit so we're going to basically do that to the exact same thing to the other side so now that we have our two eyes the hardest part's done making sure we keep them directly in line we're going to tie an overhand knot now it's really important that this overhand knot is perfect see that our strands aren't crossing they're completely in line wrapping around each other and before you make this really really tight we're going to make sure that we did everything correctly so we'll take our noose and we'll feed it through both of our eyelets and the way that I because sometimes when you're first starting to make these you're not sure do I feed it through this way or this way what I found is that the there's a natural bend in the in the rope after you tie the overhand and you just want to wrap it around and follow that bend so almost like completing that that triangle if that makes sense we have these two angles and we're just going to come through here and this is a great example of when you haven't left enough space the these need to sit directly up against the knot so I'm going to come back out so after we've adjusted our knot we'll try again what we should be left with is this big giant overhand knot so I'll come back out now that I like that I like the length this so when when you're feeding it back through these should be tight against the knot without a lot of extra space so it might take a few times you can back out and just until you get it right but once you get it right you can undo it again and really tighten down that overhand does the overhand naturally tighten itself once you start using it absolutely you just want it to sit proper right when you start yeah these things get hard as a rock after rigging on them a couple times okay it looks pretty nice and even no extras that one sits on top of that one that's normal right yep since the the knot is so large I just like to make sure that I've left myself enough room to get it around the knot it kind of equalizes itself that's important to note that I made a smaller one than I usually do for demonstration purposes this is pretty much a perfect four inch soft shackle out of about six feet but as you noticed it's going to take a lot of space to get over that knot so I like to make them a little bit larger because we're only left with about that this is a 12 inch ruler and you can see the size of this one he just made and this longer one that he uses now he takes this is one inch tubular right yes to to pad his soft shackle which can be beneficial for the life of your soft shackle but if something's going to cut through this is going to cut cut through this so you still have to be mindful of how you're using these where where's your berry on this guy he's like right this it's a little bit closer than I usually like so the berry stops right here and where's the berry on this guy stops right here okay so it's not a problem it's actually better if this berry was maybe down in here more absolutely but I do think this is going to be plenty strong because the berry is all tied up in this literally so should we make a five millimeter and then go test it keep in mind this one took six feet of am steel to make whereas this guy only took four so it does take a bit more am steel to use the big overhand so I just made a five millimeter because we want to test both and um what I did was pretty much everything as you just saw but what you can see here is my tails were too long here and so you can actually get um I can almost get the pin in there while it's sitting flush right here so I have to re-tie this knot to get a little higher and then uh to get it to sit tight so we want this knot to be rock hard when we're done Mel has also made bracelets this is seven sixty fourths and uh we did actually break test one of these uh before that he gave me just to see how strong it was it was like three thousand something pounds we'll put that in the video here as well but I'm gonna fix this and we're gonna go to the garage and start to break stuff on our slack snap machine welcome to slack snap in my garage what we have here is a 20 foot long test bed a couple dynamometers on this side lots of pulleys on that side and a costco winch on that side so we can basically break stuff like this whenever we feel like it in our socks if you watch all of these episodes please consider becoming a patreon spot us a few dollars on paypal if you'd like to see these break tests and go check out the bolting bible in our highline university courses everything on the website's free we want to make sure that you stay safe when you get high that was actually really good if you want to try some specialty instant coffee I just started this business with my friends go to brewjuno.com and support this channel by buying some instant coffee let's start pulling okay so pretty strong oh dude it didn't break at the noose whoa look how weird look how weird this looks now it is all messed up but it usually it's supposed to break in like the noose right here that's where all the other um butternut soft shackles break but it looks like it broke at the taper or what I should say is I cheated and didn't exactly taper like I should maybe we can make another episode put in the comments below if you want to see me find out how much the taper makes a difference but like we just wanted a general idea the consensus is 49.75 kilonewtons and if you don't know what that is in english it's 10 900 pounds fun fact that's the working load limit of my dyno here so we have to eliminate this in order to break our next soft shackle this knot actually looks better that looks still looks nice and pretty hard it broke in the noose because mel tapered uh the things like he was supposed to and it broke at 14 450 pounds of force or about 64 kilonewtons so that's pretty impressive how strong these things are and this uh seven sixty fourths one was about three thousand six hundred pounds of force or 16 kilonewtons if i'm not mistaken which is also pretty impressive but obviously we don't highline on something like that we definitely aim to have a three to one or a five to one safety ratio whenever we are climbing or highlining these are not practical in the climbing community um I can't think about where you would want these it's nice in highlining because you have like a static anchor that's set for the whole time I don't think anybody wants to carry these up and climb with them put in the comments below where we could use soft shackles in climbing I know that climbing slings like shoulder length slings are made out of dyneema and some other products a lot of slings that go on cams now to make them lighter are also this material but sewn in the skinny dyneema slings like you see we've done quite a few break tests on that make sure you check out our other videos on mammoth slings and quad anchor slings and all sorts of stuff that we've done and your feedback is really important so please put in the comments also if you want me to chase down a rabbit hole about sizes different ways of tying these maybe I can tie the button knot wrong to find out how bad you can screw that up before you die um we can do tapered not tapered long doubled up quadrupled up this machine does go up to 50,000 pounds so uh tell me what you want to see I read everything and it does steer us on what we do next in our videos now keep in mind we have done quite a few tests on button knot soft shackles using plasma and am steel which is what this brand is I'll put in the link in the description below where I get my am steel at the best price they don't give me a kickback but um it's definitely the best price that I have found at least in the United States when I order it instead of you smashing your soft shackles be sure to smash that like button and don't forget to like follow and subscribe so you don't miss any of our future episodes cheers hey thanks for watching but please don't be an idiot and try to go highlining or climbing or repeat the stunts you see on this channel without going with someone who knows what they're doing these sports come at a very high risk but can be done safely and that's what this channel is devoted to helping you understand what you're looking at when you do get the chance to learn from somebody in person we have tons of resources they're all free and they're all at how not to highline.com we have the bolting bible which we just finished the 2.02 version 2020 version and it's 133 pages 426 photos 216 links that work it's super thorough if you want to learn bolting and we also have highline university international which is all free courses now and highlighting 101 is done how to use a highline that's already rigged and we are doing the anchors and rigging 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